I’ve been feeling really hard on myself recently. I just  took a nap and it helped me feel a lot better but I’ve been  doing a lot of thinking and  I  feel like it might be  helpful to get it off my chest.

Basically…. well, something I’ve been thinking about  a lot recently is my relationships. I didn’t  really have any intentional  relationships as a  child— I’ve  always been surrounded by my humongous family and I felt like my “friends” were, for the most part, whoever I just happened  to socialize with trough my family. I had a few friends of my own at school who are still in my life and important to me but to this day I honestly can’t tell you how I met or clicked with those people— I don’t recall ever going out of my way to bond with anyone because I was surrounded by people every second of every day without ever having to do anything, so socially relating to people really just wasn’t a thing I ever was taught to do or honestly considered on my own. Situations where that was a the norm, such as navigating  parties with large groups of people where my siblings were otherwise occupied and so not available for me to  hire behind, or having one-on-one conversations with people, were quite frankly panic-inducing and incredibly emotionally exhausting for me. That’s not news to me, I’ve known all my life that I was “shy” (in retrospect, meaning that I avoided social situations specifically because I didn’t understand how to handle them and being forced to do that made me extremely anxious).

That drastically changed in college, where for the first time in my life  I both felt like I was an individual person and was treated by others  like one. It feels like that should have been a nightmare for someone like me, but it ended up unbelievably easy for me to fit in— almost like socializing was an ocean I’d been pushed into for the first time and even though I didn’t know how to  swim, I figured out on the spot because  the only  alternative was drowning. I ended up with dozens of close friends and social groups that I was a part of and filled literally every hour of every day with companionship that, for  the first time, was something I both deliberately pursued and actually chose for myself, on my own terms.  I lived such a joyfully extraverted life that I wasn’t even able to recognize myself as the same person I’d been before. The difference was so drastic I’d even joke to people that I didn’t develop sentience until college, which was really only partly a joke to me. Again, that’s a transformation I’ve had  plenty of time to reckon with.

After graduation, I transitioned into yet another phase of my social life, which I’ve also now become more or less comfort with. Away from the constant stimulation of a college campus and separated from most of the people I’d spend  those four years with, I had to come to terms for the first time with who the version of myself that had been born in college was away from that environment. I started spending way more time alone, ostensibly because I had  to but eventually also because I started realizing that there  were  parts of my anti-social childhood self that I still had  within me and hadn’t realized I  actually missed. I  got back into old solitary habits, like reading and playing video games, and developed new  ones, like